College of Science, Engineering and Technology, Hamad Bin Khalifa University
Doha, Qatar

Yuanming Shi

School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University
Shanghai, China

Yu Xia

College of Computer Science, Sichuan Normal University
Chengdu, China

Xiaoyu Ji

College of Electrical Engineering, Zhejiang University
Hangzhou, China

Yongpan Zou

College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University
Shenzhen, China

Bowen Chen

School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Soochow University
Suzhou, China

Subrota Kumar Mondal

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Hong Kong, China

Introduction

Internet of Things as a new Internet evolution greatly impels the revolutionary development of network. With the explosion of “things” (expected to be 50 billion devices by 2020), current computing models (e.g. centralized cloud computing) and network architecture face many challenges and limitations in meeting the higher demands of ultra-low latency, huge data processing/computation, and high bandwidth, brought by IoT applications and other emerging services (like 4K videos, VR, AR, etc.). To deal with these challenges, the concept of edge computing is proposed, which attempts to push the computing intelligence and capabilities to the network edge closer to the end users. The recently emerging edge computing models include Mobile Edge Computing (MEC, standardized by ETSI), Fog Computing (proposed by Cisco), Cloudlet (developed by CMU), Micro data center (developed by Microsoft Research), and so on. These approaches, which all aim to move computation, data and control from remote cloud DC to the network edge, to some extent, conceptually partially overlaps and are also complementary. The edge computing enables IoT services to meet the requirements of low latency, high scalability and energy efficiency, as well as mitigate the traffic burdens of the transport network. However, there are still many challenges and open issues needed to be solved in edge computing, such as mobility-aware service migration problems, security and privacy concerns, the deployment optimization of edge servers, the cooperation way between Fog/Cloudlet/Edge computing and cloud computing, the resilience of edge computing system, new edge computing architectures, and so on.

This special issue encourages high quality submissions related to edge computing techniques. Experts and scholars from both industry and academia are encouraged to demonstrate their latest research progress, achievements and potential directions in this area.

Aims and Scope:Mobile edge computing architectureFog computingReal-time communication between end users and MEC serversAdoption of SDN/NFV techniques in MEC systems.Security and privacy of edge computingSurvey on edge computing: open issues, challenges, and opportunities.Mobility-aware service migrationCooperation of edge computing, fog computing and cloud computingComputation offloading techniquesPerformance analysis/evaluation of MEC systemsMEC functionalities virtualizationRecovery scheme of failed MEC systemsMEC based data analyticsAdmission control for MECPricing and billing models for MECNovel applications and services making use of MEC